


Coping Mechanisms

by TheFlashFic



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Natasha's a pal, Talk of PTSD and nightmares, memories of violence and canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 12:26:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4521888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam Wilson is used to teaching people how to cope. He's not used to those people helping him in return.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coping Mechanisms

**Author's Note:**

> This is a short thing just to dip my feet into this universe and see how it goes. First time playing with the characters, so criticism's always welcome. Post CA:TWS and technically post AoU, though I only acknowledge AoU when it comes to the current makeup of the Avengers. 
> 
> Special thanks to Benji for keeping the Sam Wilson love alive and well on my tumblr dash.

Sam has a talk with his group at the VA about coping mechanisms, healthy and unhealthy, and he stresses the need to find as many of the former as possible to avoid losing yourself in the latter. And yeah, he’s a hypocrite for that, because his favorite coping mechanism on the anniversary of Riley’s death is to lose at least three days of his life getting ridiculously shitfaced. The wrong kind of shitfaced, where he’s ended up in a hospital on an IV a couple of times.

But hey, like he tells his group all the time: just because he talks it, and means it, doesn’t mean it’s easy for him. For any of them.

He didn’t notice any massive blond visitors showing up at that talk, but a day later Steve shows up at Sam’s place with ghosts darkening those blue eyes.

He asks Sam how he copes.

Sam confesses the shitfaced thing, because when you’re sitting across from Captain America having a beer you either tell the truth or else you’re a kind of person Sam doesn’t want to know.

Steve listens to him talk, and Sam talks more than he means to about the disasters he’s woken up to after Riley benders. And one of the reasons Sam loves Steve is because he listens without judgement and nods and looks at his beer wistfully. Asks Sam to maybe make a toast for him next time. For the Commandos. Bucky, who’s still alive somewhere but leaves no trail, and needs more help than any of them.

Sam just smiles, but he knows he will.

Civilians see Captain America as the Golden Boy, the pride of the nation past and present. Moral and good and pure. Anyone who’s worn a uniform in hard times knows that if Steve Rogers is a soldier then he’s not innocent, not untarnished, not scandalized by drinking and fighting and coping badly.

Steve can’t get drunk. Not a moral issue, a sheer physical impossibility. He can’t have a wild bender, share laughs and tears and wake up only to lurch to another bottle and do it again. He copes, he confesses quietly, by staying in the war. You don’t have to get over it until it’s over, right? If he stays fighting forever maybe all that loss will never have a chance to catch up.

It’s talks like those where Steve’s eyes show all his ninety-something years. Talks like those where Sam feels a hundred right alongside him.

He loves Steve for those talks.

Hell, he’s gone back into the trenches himself because of those talks, and Steve, and the slim chance that maybe fighting a war really will keep grief at bay.

He’s not sure if he’d describe that as healthy or the dead opposite, if he were gonna talk about it at the center. He does know that every person there would understand either way.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up with acid in his throat and Riley’s body vanishing into fire and smoke in his memory.

He means to leave a message, just...something, because Steve’s told him it works both ways. But Steve answers the phone, and Sam’s so thrown-off that he talks too much about his nightmares. And his anger, and how he sometimes can’t believe he has the balls to try to tell other people how to live, when he’s barely managing sometimes.

Steve texts him an address and he goes.

DC is full of decay. Moral, political, and physical. This place Steve calls him to come to is one of those decaying places. Used to be a dance studio, judging by the sign on the door. Judging by the wood nailed over the windows and the condition of that sign it hasn’t been anything for years now.

“Stark bought it,” Steve says from the broken sidewalk, regarding the place as Sam approaches. “Says he’ll be able to use it sometime, maybe. Meantime I’ve got the keys.”

They go in, Steve unlocking the taped-up door and locking it again once they’re in.

Sam whistles lowly.

Coping mechanisms.

There’s at least a couple dozen battered old punching bags sagging on the floor in piles, and three or four swinging up on chains, a few yards between them. Everything else is bare space, except a slatted wooden bench with some supplies laid out. Old grayed mirrors line the walls.

When Steve turns on the lights, they’re old flourescents with more broken than working, and it doesn’t get much less creepy than it was in the dark.

But Steve looks around and breathes deep, proud. He heads over to that little bench. There’s a duffel bag on the floor. He picks it up and takes out a couple of rolls of handwrap.

“Used to have a set up like this in New York, a place SHIELD rented for me after hours. Mentioned I missed it, that’s when Stark sent the keys.”

“Nice to be friends with billionaires,” Sam comments as he heads over, catching a roll of wrap as Steve tosses it over. He starts unraveling it slowly, considering. “No matts, no ring?”

“Fighting someone else defeats the purpose,” Steve answers easily.

Sam raises his eyebrows but doesn’t comment.

Steve wraps his hands quickly and expertly. Sam hasn’t boxed since his training days, but he gets his own done just a little slower, and when Steve inspects them he offers a nod of approval.

There’s weird lighting, no sound, nothing but shadows moving and then the slow thumps of fists on bags, and Sam feels awkward.

For about thirty seconds.

But he can’t see Steve when he narrows in on the bag, and his body warms up fast. He’s rusty, his form’s probably off, but Steve’s not watching and that’s not the point.

Riley’s too close. His death day is still four months away, Sam hasn’t gotten any sad religious greeting cards from his mom lately, but he’s here all the same.

Guy was a cocky twerp, Sam didn’t even like him until after their first firefight. But they were the Falcons, and soon they were brothers. Within a week they went from competing with each other to the two of them stacking up numbers better than entire PJ squads. Pararescue’s a hard fucking job, they didn’t even get called out until someone was hurt, dying, caught in a firefight or a corner they couldn’t get out of alone. Being Falcons brought a whole different slice of reality to it. No planes to relax in once they were safe, no doctors to hand their patients over to. Just him and Riley getting into places no one else could get into, having only each other to lean on, either bringing guys back alive or hauling corpses.

The motherfucker who shot him down wasn’t even that good. That’s the thing that pisses Sam off most. Not that one of them was shot down, because that was always an option. Being a Falcon meant being more vulnerable to taking fire than pilots were. Smaller and quicker, but there was nothing between them and the thick lead that blasted from their targets.

But the shits who caught Riley, they were spraying like fucking amateurs. Weren’t even close, fired wild, strafed areas nobody was in for entire seconds at a time. They only started firing RPGs when they ran out of ammo for the fucking ZPU they were pissing out into the sky.

It was the definition of a lucky shot, taking Riley down.

And it pisses Sam off. It pisses him off like nothing else, even when Sam took the guy holding the RPG out less than 45 seconds later and insured he wouldn’t get any kind of credit for his kill.

The idea that life and death is so fucking arbitrary, that’s what Sam struggles with the most. That’s what he finds it hardest to counsel people about. Why Riley? Why was that warhead in that one piece of air at that one half a second? There wasn’t skill in it. The skill was all on Riley’s side. So it was sheer bad fucking luck.

That’s what Sam doesn’t know how to process. And that’s why he’s pounding the bags at three in the morning with Captain America.

He isn’t sure how long he stays in his own head. By the time he thinks about Steve and where they are and what they’re doing again, his arms are shaking, his shirt is soaked with sweat, and he’s panting for air.

He fires a few more jabs now that he’s aware of himself enough to take real satisfaction out of them, and then he sags against the firm weight of the bag and looks back at Steve.

In an instant he understands what Steve meant, about hitting someone else defeating the purpose.

Steve’s got some kinda super strength to him, Sam knows, but there’s something else in him at this moment. Focus. Fury. He goes after that bag with absolutely no restraint. Whatever he’s thinking about, whatever he sees in that bag, there is no part of him that doesn’t despise it.

Steve would never be like that with another person, friend or enemy. He’d never let himself go. The bag’s the point. The bag can take every blast he fires at it, and that fury blazing through his eyes looks like relief to Sam.

The fallen bags on the floor have layers of duct tape to them, the one Sam’s leaning against as he catches his breath is more tape than vinyl. But he’s still a little surprised when a blow Steve lands literally rips into the bag. Splits it in half. Tape tears with a rip like thunder and the bottom half of the bag flies off, hitting the ground in a blaze of sand and weighted bearings.

Steve stays braced for a moment, but his shoulders sag and his fists drop and he lets out a breath, reaching instantly for the chain the empty top half of the bag dangles from.

“I don’t think there’s enough duct tape in the world to fix this one, man.”

He looks around in surprise, spots Sam, and stares for a moment. Forgot he was there. Sam would take it personally if it wasn’t for his own mental blackout when he was hitting the bag.

Sam smiles, just faint and brief enough to show he’s not really making a joke of any of this. But Steve’s dripping with sweat, his skin is red everywhere, and Sam doesn’t even have to be a medic to know that they’re done for the night.

He approaches, flexing his fingers against the wrap, and smiles a little at the rasp of sand beneath his shoes as he passes a few feet from the shattered remains of that bag. “Any damage?”

Steve frowns, but looks down at his hands and shakes them out a little. “Nah. Never is. You?”

“You’d be taking me to Walter Reed if there was. I value my hands.”

Steve smiles at that, and there’s a little relaxation of the thickness in the air.

Neither of them are grim people, really. Steve feels nice way less often than he acts nice, Sam suspects, but that doesn’t mean he’s dark. They just owe things to people. Rationality and sense and being a support pillar. So the darkness has to saturate these small moments when nobody needs them to be bright.

Sam smiles at that thought, at the idea that he and Steve have way more in common than he ever would’ve thought before he met the man.

He approaches Steve and puts a hand on his sweaty shoulder, feeling his muscles trembling faintly with his breaths. “Thanks for sharing this.”

Steve meets his eyes. He reaches up, the tape-roughness of his wrapped palm finding Sam’s forearm and laying there lightly. “Thanks for understanding it.”

 

* * *

 

Being an Avenger, officially, hasn’t done much to change Sam’s life. Stark’s trying to talk him into moving to NYC, but his life’s in DC with his group, and that isn’t changing. Stark mentions all the Avengers have rooms in the Tower whenever they’re in town, and Sam doesn’t think about that much. A room whenever he wants in a billionaire’s home in Midtown Manhattan. Crazy.

Still. The Avengers are an as-needed group. They train all together sometimes, figure out how they can work as a team and how they need to compliment each other. But not often.

Steve splits his time, most in New York working with Vision and Wanda. But some in DC too, in a rented apartment with his rusted dance studio gym, and Sam isn’t quite sure why he’s there so much. They don’t train, Sam or Rhodey. They’re soldiers, they already know battle. But Steve comes by the center and visits Sam, and probably does the same with Rhodey, and maybe that’s the point. Staying in contact.

Sam doesn’t quite realize the implications of that until he looks up from the office space he shares with a half dozen other counselors at the center and sees a crop-haired redhead smirking at him from the doorway.

“I keep telling Steve that there’s no way that a soldier who works with vets in DC doesn’t have a whole pile of anger inside of him, but he insists you’re the most level guy he knows.”

Sam greets Natasha with a grin. “Nice look. Is that enough to keep the paps away?”

She slides in and shuts the door behind her, a casual gesture but the click feels loud. Her fingers ruffle through her hair - damn near buzzed on the sides, longer on top, kinda punk, really fitting.

“Paps don’t come looking for spies. My kind of fame is completely different from Steve’s. Thank whatever god you believe in.”

“I hear that.” Sam gestures at the little worn chair beside the cramped desk. “How you doing?”

“Keeping busy,” she says with a hint of a smirk. Her kind of busy might have a body count, wars being started, might just involve apartment-hunting. The interesting thing about Natasha is that her attitude about all of the above would probably be exactly the same.  

She sits in the chair, sags, casual, and surveys the cramped space. “I bet you guys have the budget of a community dinner theatre,” she says idly.

Sam shrugs. Probably not far off. “Is that why you think a guy working with vets must have anger issues?”

“Why else? You’re in DC, surrounded by the rich men who made the choice to start these wars, and you know more than anyone what kind of pittance those same men are allowing for the treatment of vets.”

“Just feeds my determination, not my anger.”

She raises an eyebrow.

He smiles, nice and polite and bland.

She laughs after a moment. “You’re convincing as hell, no wonder Steve thinks you’re a wellspring of rationality.”

“You calling him naive?”

She blinks. “Are you calling him anything else?”

Sam smiles at that, but it feels tight. Steve should be naive. The people around Steve should allow it. Protect it. But no, he’s seen Steve take on a bag, he’s seen the fury in him. Steve knows the worst of the world. It would be a mistake to underestimate him.

“He talks about you a lot.” Natasha hasn’t moved, she’s still lounging and looking around, but there’s a sudden note in her words that makes Sam look at her carefully.

Sam just shrugs. “We’re friends. I’d talk about him all the time myself if it wouldn’t come across like name-dropping.”

She doesn’t smile. “Steve doesn’t have friends.”

He feels like he’s being challenged. If so it’s easy to counter. “Yet here I sit.”

“You’re his teammate.”

“They’re not mutually exclusive.”

She sits up then, her attention shifting to him and staying there. “Sam, listen to me. He doesn’t have friends. There’s not a single person in that idiot’s life that he doesn’t fight beside. Everything he does is about the war - whatever war it is he’s trying so hard to stay involved in. He doesn’t relax, he debriefs. He doesn’t have hobbies, he trains. When he travels, it’s to check in on his team. When he sleeps he’s probably dreaming in strategies.”

“He’s my friend,” Sam says simply, firmly. He’s not arguing with anything she’s saying, but he’s not about to let that fact get brushed aside.

She’s got a point, though. He’s noticed it unconsciously for a while, but as she talks it becomes a conscious realization. He and Steve get together and have beers, sure, but what they talk about is the fight. Steve has his late-night coping mechanism, but it’s just another form of battle.

Natasha’s studying him, and that woman’s focus is something intense. “I’ve known him a few years now, as well as anyone can. I see a lot of things he doesn’t think he shows. I’ve tried making it my business to push him into finding some kind of life for himself, but coming from me...it’s not serious. Our relationship...there’s a lot of trust there. On both sides. But not a lot that’s not about the fight.”

She nods at Sam. “You. You’re different, at least you could be. I think he needs it. The way he talks about you, I think he’s practically begging for it.”

Sam studies her. “You’re worried about him.”

Another easy nod. “He’s acting more like me than he should. Some of us were born to be part of a fight. He isn’t one of them. He’s good, don’t get me wrong, but he needs something else to make it worth it.”

“You sure _you’re_ one of them?”

She waves him off, but smiles briefly. “I’m not here for a session, counselor.”

“Steve is actually a functional adult, you realize.”

“In a lot of ways, he’s really not.” She holds up a hand even as he opens his mouth to object. “This isn’t about the time thing. It’s not about him still learning the modern world. I know he’s not the ignorant kid someone like Stark treats him like. But you know his life. Every kid who grew up post 1940s knows his life. He was nothing but a tiny shriveled up pile of problems before that serum. He was poor and sick and an orphan during the depression. Chronically sick, the kind of sick where he had to focus just to be up and walking. He missed out on a hell of a lot of things a normal guy goes through. He was sick, he was small, and then suddenly he was a soldier. Right when he could stop focusing on his own health, his focus went to fighting. And it’s been there ever since. So no, as adult as he is and as sharp as he is, there’s a hell of a lot of things he doesn’t know anything about. He has no idea what he’s missing out on. And he deserves to find it.”

Sam finds himself nodding, because it makes sense. It fits.

First time he met Steve he was one hundred percent convinced the guy was flirting with him, Captain America or not. He came to figure out fast that Steve doesn’t know the difference. He can barely even detect flirting from some of the women Sam has watched throwing themselves at Steve. He doesn’t notice, and then they go too far trying to make him notice, and he goes completely awkward and strained.

That’s a guy who’s never had an actual relationship. He had a girl, Sam remembers, but it was a war thing. Rarely together, both fighting, and if Sam had to guess he’d say they never had a single night alone together before the ice took him.

He does have a hobby. He draws. Sam’s seen him do it, five or ten minutes at a time in furtive, quiet moments on a wilted little notebook he carries around with him. But it’s a guilty thing, like he doesn’t think he should when there’s other things to focus on.

Natasha stands up suddenly. She seems satisfied. But she hesitates there in front of his desk, and speaks quickly and quietly: “I don’t know anyone like him. I’ve never trusted anyone to be completely up and up with me, but him I trust. Don’t get me wrong, I trust people to fight beside me and to have my back when I need it, but most of those people are like me. We do the job, whatever it takes. We lie, we cheat. Steve is a different breed. Rare, even without the serum to consider. If happiness is something a person can earn, he’s earned it. You can help him find it.”

The look she gives him as she heads for the door, as he sits digesting everything she’s said, is fierce. You damn well better help him find it, she’s saying silently.

If it’s the assignment she’s treating it like, it’s one he accepts. Steve’s his friend. He loves the guy. He’s got this.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up already yelling, and it’s Riley he sees in the darkness. Always Riley.

They were supposed to come home and be heroes. That’s what they talked about those wild nights out on leave. On their own sometimes, when things managed to get serious, they’d talk about maybe coming home broken, some kind of Born on the Fourth of July scenario. Everyone knew vets weren’t much better off than they were after Vietnam.

Either way, though, they were supposed to come back together. Sam could’ve handled whatever was waiting for them if they’d been together.

Instead he isn’t a hero, and he isn’t drug addicted and homeless. He’s in this middle area, alone, and he isn’t sure he’s handling it all that well sometimes.

He gets in his car and drives. There’s a familiar motorcycle parked outside that decrepit old dance studio, so he parks and pounds on the door.

Wary blue eyes appear around an edge of the taped-up paper blocking the view inside, but the door opens instantly when Steve spots him.

Sam’s in his workout gear, track pants and a USMC t-shirt one of his pals at the center got him, and he comes in when the door opens without saying a word about why he’s there. Steve doesn’t ask.

It goes a lot like the first night. Sam feels a little self-conscious wrapping up his hands, and facing the bag, but Steve’s ahead of him and already has a rhythm set up, and it’s easy to match him for a while until Sam gets lost in his own head again.

His thoughts don’t go much different than last time, either. The anger, the unfairness, the arbitrary bullshit of Riley’s death, those aren’t things one night is gonna ease for him. Those are gonna be around for a long, long time.

Steve splits into a bag, spilling sand. This time he immediately turns to the next one and takes up right where he left off, leaving the other one wilting, bleeding out on the hardwood floor.

From his new spot Sam can see him easily, about one quarter profile. It gets harder to stay lost in his own head then, when his gaze catches on Steve every few seconds. But he keeps hitting, because the workout feels good and punching something is still cathartic even if he doesn’t lose time inside his own mind doing it.

Steve’s got good form, and Sam wonders distantly who taught him. Somebody during the war, probably, one of those Commandos.

He’s strong, he’s solid. He’s got this absurd body with these proportions like if magazines airbrushed men the way they do women. He’s impressive, Sam’s noticed it more than once. Really damned good looking. Sam’s not particularly drawn to white boys who look fresh off the farm - he and Riley never had any kind of thing, though Sam knows people suspect otherwise the way he talk about him - but he can appreciate Steve. He’s movie star pretty. Captain America pretty.

Hard to look away from.

Sam’s supposed to be helping him out. He’s got his assignment from Natasha, he’s got a few years of experience at the VA dragging people back from the wars their minds keep them trapped in. But he needs this right now. He’s got his own coping to do, and he doesn’t think Steve begrudges him for it.

In fact, he kinda thinks that’s why Steve appreciates him so much. If Sam was whole and healed, this wouldn’t work as well as it does.

He sees people hide their flaws from Captain America - Natasha Romanoff, of all people, is scared to disappoint him - but all they end up doing is make Steve feel like he can’t be flawed with them.

Sam’s lucky to have a mom who raised him right, who taught him young that nobody’s perfect but God and Samuel Wilson has no business trying to play God. Sam doesn’t have the kind of pride that makes him want to be flawless, even in front of Captain America. And as a result?

The tattered parts of him are the parts Steve seems to want to know most about.

 

* * *

 

And that’s the problem right there, at the heart of it. Steve is Captain America, that’s how he’s treated, that’s how he understands himself in the context of the modern world. Little skinny sick Steve Rogers has no place here, but that skinny and very destructible kid is as much Steve as the costume and the jingle.

That kid’s who Sam starts thinking about, when he thinks about Natasha’s mission to help Steve find a life. But what’s he know about that kid?

Steve likes to draw. But Steve goes to museums already. Says he finds modern art soothing. Sam figures it’s one more way for Steve to feel like he’s part of the new world without actually having to interact with the new world. The guy’s a spectator as often as he can get away with it. Sam asks him about maybe taking some classes, Steve just waves him off with a genuinely amused chuckle at the idea that he’d ever be an actual artist, considering everything.

And yeah, maybe he’s got a point. Maybe not, but Sam moves on to the next idea anyway. For now.

Steve was sick a lot. Okay. Sam figures maybe he’ll get something out of going to visit some sick kids, bring some happiness to the ones who are most like him as a kid. Except the one attempt to make an appearance at a children’s hospital turns into a media circus before they ever get there, and in front of the cameras and the crush of the public Steve never stops being Captain America for a second. His smiles stretch thin before he ever gets to the kids.

Bad planning. Next time Sam won’t tell anyone they’re coming. For the moment, though, it’s another bust.

It’s a guy in group at the VA who gives him his third idea, with an offhand comment about how different his grandfather’s generation handles their own war memories. Sam tells him not to compare, that just because they called it shell shock instead of PTSD and its had seventy years to heal doesn’t mean that generation was stronger or this generation is weaker. War’s war.

Still, it gets him thinking about generations and differences and how he can’t find anything for Steve to focus on because the kinds of things skinny Steve Rogers would’ve wanted to do aren’t the kinds of things people do these days.

But that’s not necessarily true. He gets a spark of an idea, hits the internet long enough to see that’s it’s not only viable, it’s actually simple, and for the first time in his life he thanks god for hipsters.

 

* * *

 

He texts Steve a few days before, says he owns his ass on Friday, end of story.

Steve sends him back a link to the Wiki page about him. Someone’s edited the opening summary paragraph to read, _“Steven Grant Rogers, better known as Captain America, was a soldier in World War Two who woulda outranked a Senior Airman from the USAF and thus refuses to be ordered around by one now, Wilson.”_

Sam laughs at that a good long time, even after he checks in later that day and finds it’s already been changed back. He’s not sure what’s more funny, the idea of Steve editing his own wiki page or the idea that that’s how he decides to answer a message.

Sometimes he thinks Steve’s friends have no concept of how tuned in to the modern world Steve Rogers actually is after the last few years.

Still, when he ends up at that dance studio hitting the heavy bags on Thursday night, Steve doesn’t say much beyond ‘should I even ask what tomorrow’s about?’ and Sam doesn’t say much more than ‘nope’.

The bags still help, even on nights when Sam doesn’t wake up screaming. On the nights he can’t sleep at all for feeling wired and wrung out. The bags help, and the silence helps, and Steve’s very human understanding helps. Maybe it’s not the healthiest way to cope, since Natasha’s right about it keeping Steve in the war, but it works. For both of them.

Next day he texts Steve:

_Wear a suit tonight. And i_ _f you answer with anything short of a Vine, I’m gonna be disappointed._

Steve answers with a thumbs-up emoji, and does link him to a Vine, but it’s just a clip of some dude singing, badly, and it’s obviously not Steve and it’s got millions of hits so its viral, but hell if Sam knows what it means.

Makes him laugh all the same. Just the idea of Steve finding this and watching it and maybe laughing himself, that makes Sam laugh. Steve’s a fucking smartass in the weirdest, most innocent ways, and Sam really does love the guy for it.

 

* * *

 

He researched before picking this place. There’s a few groups that throw events like this around the city, but most of them are small and new and hip and not what he needs. This one, it’s a long-standing thing. He called the woman who hosts them every month, she told him it actually started because of a group of WWII vets who wanted to relieve some of the good moments of the old days.

She says most of those vets are gone now, but a lot of their group is still older folks who remember doing this as kids. There’s the younger crowd too, of course, because everything these days is a fucking trend for someone, but it’s a decently mixed group.

It’s at a hotel in the middle of DC, at a wide, high-ceilinged conference room downstairs, and the dryly amused look Steve gives him when Sam meets him in front of the hotel makes Sam think Steve’s friends really don’t understand a fucking thing about him at all.

Sam just laughs and claps him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, your virtue’s safe, golden boy.”

“Should I be insulted by that?”

“Nice suit, that one of Stark’s?”

That’s what makes Steve go a little pink, presumably because he did go to Stark to get himself a suit. But it is a good one, well-tailored, brings out his absurd proportions. It’s a good thing Sam knows he looks damn good in his own slightly less expensive suit, a guy could develop issues this way.

“Come on.” He nudges Steve’s arm and they head inside. Sam scouted out the place first so he heads past the desk and the conference announcements and he takes them right to the room they’re supposed to be at, and as they approach the music becomes audible.

Steve slows, shooting Sam a look. Sam just grabs his arm and hauls him on.

Inside the wide double doors it looks like something out of a Boggart film. The lights are gold and dim, giving everything kind of a sepia tone, and everyone’s decked out. Suits and dresses, most of them deliberately 40s style. Some uniforms, even, mostly on the grey-hairs. There’s a five piece band on a little platform in the corner, playing some Glenn Miller kind of something or other, tables around the edges where folks sit and chat, and people swinging each other around right in the middle of the floor.

Sam doesn’t figure it’s all that close to what Steve might’ve known, but it’s something.

When he looks over at Steve, he looks a little wide-eyed. Sam claps him on the arm. “So what do you think?”

Steve shakes his head slowly. “Not smokey enough.”

“You can take that up with the health department. Come on.”

Steve trails behind him, looking around at everything, and Sam takes that as a good sign as he tracks down the woman he spoke to on the phone. Shirley, her name was, and he finds her hanging around a table with an actual punch bowl, surrounded by a group of chattering old folks. She looks to be in her eighties herself, but her white hair’s in pin curls and her dress is pure gangster moll, and he grins as he sees her.

“Mr. Wilson, must be.” She sticks out her hand to him as he approaches. “We don’t get a lot of strangers just wandering in.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He shakes her hand with a grin. “Nice set-up you’ve got here.”

She waves it away. “Been coming to this room every month the last twelve years. Not much, but it works. Cheaper than those dance halls the younger kids rent out.” She studies him. “You bring your vet friend along?”

Sam glanced around for Steve, who’s still approaching slowly, looking around. He grabs his arm and hauls him in. “I think he might need some lessons before he gets out there.”

“We’ve got plenty of people willing to teach…” She trails off as she takes Steve in. Her eyes get wide, then squint at him, then go wide again.

Sam chuckles. “How about it, man? Ready for a lesson?”

The smile Steve sends him is dazed, bright-eyed, and has Sam silently doing a victory fist-pump in his head. “Think I’ll pick it up faster now than I would have the first time around,” he says, looking around at Shirley and the rest of her suddenly silent group.

Shirley stumbles in before Sam can ask, gaping at Steve. “Hell with the lesson, Captain. I’ve been having this dream since I was fifteen years old. Let’s dance.”

Sam laughs, and laughs again at Steve’s response.

He squares his shoulders, bends a little, kisses her hand gravely. “Ma’am.”

She full-on blushes, titters, and pulls him out to the dance floor, wobbly on her feet.

Sam grabs one of her slightly-younger friends and gets a lesson himself, a couple of minutes of step and swing pointers, and then he’s out there doing himself some justice, keeping up with the pros.

 

* * *

 

He loses sight of Steve at one point as he’s dancing, but spots him by a table of old men in uniform. Shirley’s plastered to his side, making introductions, and there’s a kind of liveliness on Steve’s face that Sam’s not sure he’s actually seen there before. It makes Sam feel a glow himself. Downright smug, really, that he thought of this at all.

Maybe it’s not exactly what Natasha had in mind. Those old men and their stories might be keeping him in the war, and all this whole thing might be doing is putting Steve back to a time he can’t actually have back. But it feels right. Like a start, at least.

Thing about it is that Sam’s got no idea how to go about helping a guy like Steve. He knows PTSD, not temporal displacement. He’s guessing, and all Steve’s friends have been guessing from the start. Steve himself has just been guessing this whole time, he figures.

All he knows is that when Steve finally heads back to the dance floor with a different grey-haired old woman with stars in her eyes, he looks happy. His eyes scout out, stop when they find Sam out there swaying his current partner around, and he _glows_. He looks like a twenty-something kid.

He’s guessing, but he’s trying. Woke up in a different world, lost everyone he knew, everything familiar to him, and he’s still trying to make it work. Sam respects the hell out of him for that, really.

The old-timers close it down later than Sam would’ve thought, and he’s worn out while a lot of them still seem ready to tear up the floor. He likes it, the whole thing, it’s a pretty fun way to spend an evening. He’s here for Steve, but now that Sam thinks about it it’s been a long time since he actually went out and cut loose for a night. At least without alcohol and a mindset bent towards oblivion.

He and Steve wander out of the hotel into the cool dark of the street, and Sam has a hard time looking away from Steve’s face. He’s smiling, still, but there’s more to it. He’s relaxed, he’s loose, in a way Sam only just realizes he’s never seen before, even after hours punching a bag.

Sam throws an arm around Steve’s shoulder as they head towards the parking garage. “Same time next month?”

Steve laughs. “I promised Shirley, so we better.”

“There’s a few other groups who do things like this, if you want to…?”

“Nah.” Steve’s arm wraps around his waist loosely. “I like this group.”

“Yeah.” Sam feels good, even as they reach Steve’s bike and slow to a stop. “So, look, I know you’re headed back to New York in a--”

Steve’s arm tightens around his waist as he turns in to Sam, and that’s all the warning Sam gets before Steve’s fingers slide around to the back of his neck, and suddenly their mouths are pressed together.

As surprise kisses go...well, maybe he’s not as surprised as he could be. Sam’s hand slides between them, finds the collar of Steve’s fancy suit and grips, tight. Steve feels warm against the cool air, his breath a flutter on Sam’s cheek as their lips meet.

He pulls back before Sam’s entirely prepared to let him. His eyes open. His gaze is steady on Sam, face flushed. “If you didn’t want that, I’ll apologize.”

But only then, Sam hears plain as day, and something about that makes him grin. Steve’s got a straight-forwardness to him that Sam really does appreciate. And he’s brave in these little ways, brave every way a man can be, really, and that’s one of the things Sam loves most about…

Oh.

Well, shit.

He laughs to himself, since apparently he’s even more clueless than Steve Rogers presumably is. But he shakes his head, feeling warm and happy and a little less haunted right then. “If you wanna waste your breath I’ve got better ways you can waste it,” he says in response.

Steve grins, lights up like fireworks, and as Sam pulls him in again he wonders if this was anything like what Natasha had in mind.

 

* * *

 

He tells his group at the VA often that there’s no cure-all for what they’re going through. There’s no one thing gonna come along and make everything better. Not a coping method, not a person, not a feeling.

He tells them: expect to take steps back. Find things that work for you, and even when you still wake up with blasts in your ears and panic in your veins you hold tight to those things. Because having a nightmare after a good day doesn’t negate the good day.

And he believes that. He speaks truth to his group. He knows a night of dancing isn’t going to make Steve Rogers feel more a part of this time than he did the day before. He knows necking on the back of a bike like a teenager with America’s greatest hero isn’t going to banish Riley from his dreams at night. He knows he’s still gonna get shitfaced in a few months’ time, and the minute Bucky Barnes leaves any kind of hint where he is Steve’s gonna be off chasing ghosts. Maybe they both will.

But it’s something. It’s a lot.

When Natasha wakes him the next morning with a text that just says _‘You’re welcome’_ he turns his phone off with a groan, rolls over and buries his face against a broad, ridiculously proportioned chest, and that’s something, too.

 


End file.
